Voluntary Disclosure and Internal Corporate Governance Mechanisms

Firstly, the study aims to measure the level of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of listed banks in Borsa Istanbul over the period from 2013 to 2017. Secondly, it pursues to investigate if the level of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports has been increased significantly during the study period. Lastly, this study examines the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and the level of voluntary disclosure. This study adopts a self-constructed un-weighted disclosure index including 64 items to measure the extent of voluntary disclosure in 65 annual reports of 13 banks. The study applied content, descriptive, correlation and multiple FGLS regression analyses to analyze the research data. The results showed that the extent of voluntary disclosure in the banks was high, with an overall average of 77%. Also, there was a significant increase in the level of voluntary disclosure over the period. The regression results showed that board independence, board size, audit committee financial expertise, and audit committee meetings were significant in explaining the variation in the level of voluntary disclosure, whilst other independent variables were insignificant.